


We're only science

by HelveticaBrown



Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-08
Updated: 2017-01-08
Packaged: 2018-09-15 18:06:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 668
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9249590
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HelveticaBrown/pseuds/HelveticaBrown
Summary: Alex spends a lot of time thinking about Maggie's smile and what it's made of.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Just a wee little ficlet in which Alex is a big, big nerd (and I am too).

* * *

 

Alex remembers hearing in a first-year anatomy class that dimples are the result of a bifid zygomaticus major muscle. She hasn’t given it much thought since then, but lately it’s a topic that has come to occupy her mind quite inexplicably. To some, a dimple is a flaw in the design, a two where there should be one, a space where there should be none. But Alex is convinced, whether through chaos or design, Maggie Sawyer’s dimples are proof that nature achieves perfection at least some of the time.

She knows that Maggie’s smile is the perfect confluence of a series of chemical and electrical reactions. It’s neurotransmitters and nerve conduction, action potentials and muscle contraction powered by adenosine triphosphate and actin-myosin couplings. She knows she could map out each of the steps required to culminate in the gentle curve of her lips, the crinkles at the corner of her eyes, the flash of bright, white teeth.

The thing is, although she understands the how of it, she doesn’t understand the why. Why Maggie smiles at her like that. Why Maggie’s smiles make her heart speed up and her mouth go dry. She puzzles at this for the longest time, because she doesn’t like questions that don’t have answers.

Later, when she understands a little more of the _why_ , she tells Maggie some of this. Maggie smiles and calls her a nerd, then kisses her, long and deep and slow. She feels the steady lub-dub of her heart turn staccato because it’s not just Maggie’s smiles that have that effect.

Alex knows the human body, knows the names of all 206 bones, knows muscles and their attachments, knows nerves and vessels and cells and their functions. But now there’s art where there was only ever science and it’s like she’s seeing in another dimension, like there’s a depth to it that wasn’t there before.

She comes to know Maggie’s body, studies it with all the focus and intensity she’s applied to every other subject before. She learns the sharp lines of her clavicles, the muscular planes of her abdomen, the smooth skin of her thighs. She thinks she could name each freckle, each mole, each scar from memory alone if she was asked. Sometimes she maps them out in her mind and wonders at the stories behind them.

There’s a scar on Maggie’s side, knotted and ugly and beautiful. _Close call_ , Maggie says when Alex runs her fingers over it the first time and she feels relief welling up in her throat. Relief that there’s a here and a now and she can touch this scar and the warm, unspoiled flesh around it. Scars are proof of a heart that keeps beating, of cells performing the labours they were designed for, of healing imperfect but enough.

There’s fear too, though. Alex has seen too many wounds that will never have time to form scars and when she runs her fingers over Maggie’s scars, she fears that next time there’ll be a bullet or a blade that won’t miss by enough. There _will_ be a next time, that much she’s sure of, and she wonders if her own heart would keep beating if Maggie’s was not.

She learns her own body too. Hands that were first taught to heal and then to kill are now imbued with a new purpose. They’re made to cup the perfect weight of Maggie’s breasts, to caress, to explore. Her body is designed for pleasure, both given and taken, and it makes sense to her in a way it never had before.

She muses on this as they lie together in the dark, the echoes of pleasure there in the sweat on her skin, in the ache of muscles driven to the point of fatigue, in nerve endings humming with the memory of Maggie’s touch. She muses on this until Maggie turns and kisses her again, kisses her until she forgets everything she’s ever known other than Maggie here and now in this moment.


End file.
